The IKEA KARLBY worktop has quietly become the backbone of countless home offices. It’s cheap, solid, and pairs with almost anything. Below are five setups that real people built and use every day. Each one solves a different problem, whether that’s tight space, a tall user, or a budget that won’t stretch to a custom desk. 1. The KARLBY and ALEX IKEA Desk Setup Pairing a KARLBY worktop with two ALEX drawer units is the most copied IKEA desk setup, and for good reason...

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-45447 for the project OpenSSL , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a heap use-after-free in PKCS7_verify(). This is due to the affected components being written in C, the only programming language where these vulnerabilities regularly happen. "This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there's nothing anyone ca...

The following has been adapted from The Proof in the Code: How a Truth Machine Is Transforming Math and AI by Kevin Hartnett. Terry Tao has never been afraid of unconventional ideas. In November 2014, he was on a panel of five distinguished mathematicians, all inaugural recipients of the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, which came with a $3 million award. The laureates’ conversation ranged… Source The following has been adapted from The Proof in the Code: How a Truth Machine Is Transfor...

The relationship engineers have with product management is more dysfunctional than with any other part of the company. There’s no shared culture or language like there is with other engineers, and the rules of “who gets to tell who what to do” aren’t as clear-cut as they are with managers. Engineers don’t have a lot in common with legal, or design, or sales, but they also don’t need to interact much with those roles. In my experience, engineers are communicating with product managers...

A few weeks ago, I was at my brother’s place, watching NBA, and amongst other things, I was teasing him about the fact that he’s putting up weight. Which is just a fact. But he’s also in his 40s, so that’s understandable. He pointed out that I’m also gaining weight (but I’m not in my 40s), and since it was a long time since I weighed myself, I decided to hop on a scale, and the number that came out was 89.6kg. Now, I’m 190cm tall, so being almost 90kgs isn’t really a tragedy but ...

Last week I wrote about the problem with using the accept attribute for uploading files. As a quick reminder: When you use the accept to specify which file types will be allowed like this: …the dialog will disable invalid types like this: This is bad because: The disabled files are greyed out making them hard to read Some users won’t notice the subtle greyed out styling - so will try clicking the invalid files anyway And this will make the interface feel unrespo...

Our 64-bit Intel and AMD processors have evolved over decades. When you compile a Go program for a 64-bit Intel or AMD processor, the compiler targets, by default, a nearly 20-year-old instruction set. The binary that comes out runs on essentially any x64 chip, but it also leaves on the table every instruction that was added since 2003. We often refer to microarchitecture levels . Each level bundles a set of instruction-set extensions that you can assume are present: Level Adds (rou...

“Glasgow, Saturday Night” by John Atkinson Grimshaw, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at chatbots replacing realtors, Chinese synthetic diamonds, Australian batteries, Meta’s data center tents, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Iran war Iran breaks off negotiations with the US and vows to “c...

Yep, I definitely won't buy a bigger #3DPrinter. 🫣 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Yep, I definitely won't buy a bigger #3DPrinter. 🫣 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and s...

LangChain recently posted about a database they built. I liked the post quite a bit, I thought it was pretty well written and did a really good job of explaining their architecture. It highlighted for me some of the interesting database challenges and workloads that are consequences of AI. This is an "observability database," which sits sort of outside the traditional OLTP/OLAP dichotomy, but leans a bit on the OLAP side. It exists to collect data from a bunch of different sources (in LangCh...

After five weeks in New Zealand, it was time for a change of scenery. Following my original plan and given the proximity, Australia was the obvious choice. However, I had to shorten my stay to reach Japan in time for the cherry blossoms. I decided to split the next two weeks between Melbourne and Sydney. I was also looking forward to finally slowing down and staying more than 1–2 nights in the same place (or so I thought 😅). Just a few days before my arrival, Melbourne was named the "...

Click to skip the introduction and go straight to the results. The first part of the story is that, as I already wrote here and here , I am using self-hosted Umami as the analytics engine for this blog. I am using it because I am curious to know how many people visit my blog, and I like numbers and graphs. Of course in this day and age, saying "humans" is a stretch, because you can never be sure if a visit is a human, or a bot. Umami does filter out a lot of the automated traffic because ...

https://austinhenley.com/blog/automatingmyjob.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/automatingmyjob.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/automatingmyjob.html

The familiar sounds of the espresso machine never cease to calm me – the joy of the familiar, but also the potential of the variable: of sounds at new tones, of different cadences. Watching as the barista makes sure to stop pulling the espresso shot at 33 seconds — precision at every step. Classical music, quiet conversation, and the awakening of the day permeate the cafe, illuminated by the light passing through the tall windows, and accompanied by the smell of freshly brewed coffee. I hear...

(In 2008 I wrote a survey of some of the known sum-product theorems, see  here . Avi Wigderson has a great slide-set on sum-product theorems and their applications---the slides are on Avi's webpage of talks he has given (all the talks are excellent) which is  here . I had a prior post on sum-product theorems  here )  If \(A\) is a set then let \(A+A = \{ x+y \ \colon\  x,y\in A \} \),     \(A\cdot A = \{ xy \ \colon \  x,y\in A \} \). Let \(A= \{1,\ldots,n\} \). \(|A+A| = \Theta(n...

Automatic programming dramatically speeds up writing software in certain use cases and in the right hands. In my experience the output does not reach the structural quality and economy of complexity of the best hand-written software. However, not all the software is stellar, and my feeling is that automatic programming surpasses most of the times (and if well managed) the quality of decently developed hand-written code. Yet, there is a tradeoff between quality and time, in the case of writing...

Tigris is S3-compatible, which means you can point the AWS SDK at it and most things just work. The catch is that the Tigris-exclusive features—bucket forking, snapshots, object renaming, and the like—need verbose workarounds because the AWS SDK doesn't know they exist. So we wrote a Go SDK that does. It comes in two flavors: the storage package is a drop-in replacement for the standard S3 client with first-class methods for the Tigris-specific operations, and simplestorage is ...

Today was our first full day in Ho Chi Minh City again on this trip , and the weather almost held out for the whole day! It was humid and sticky, just like I remembered every day in Singapore feeling. There was some light drizzle later in the afternoon and into the early evening, but it brought a refreshing, cool change which was beautiful. I think the Little River Band did a song about that. I wish I had kept a travel journal for our first Vietnam trip which we took last year, because I’...

A week in which some things happen and some things do not happen, much like other weeks.  Current situation: Not pictured: The 3 different kinds of beef jerky we just got at Buc-ee’s. The pain of having children who become driving teenagers is the exorbitant cost of auto insurance. The joy is getting to stare out the window as the midwestern landscape moves by and think about nothing and everything for hours at a time.  Monday 01 June: Dentist in ...

In order to understand how the world works, we have to understand how we got here. That’s also a bit much for one blog post, but the sections below summarize a few things I didn’t know when I started trying to figure it out. See the first and second posts in this series for context. The Creation of Money In the 1660s, London merchants who needed somewhere safe to store their gold and silver began using the vaults of goldsmiths, who already had the locks and the reputation. The gold...

The Chandrayaan 3 lander on the Moon imaged by the mission’s rover Pragyan. Image: ISRO India’s Chandrayaan program is one of the few in the world dedicated to the exploration of our Moon. Starting with its discovery of lunar water that catalyzed the global Moon rush of today, the program has gotten media and creator attention worldwide. However, the coverage has often lacked the program’s specific scientific, technological, and geopolitical outcomes being laid out and contextualized agai...

Mirroring a static Hugo blog onto ATProto with standard.site and Sequoia, plus the GitHub Actions wiring that republishes the records on every push without any manual steps. Mirroring a static Hugo blog onto ATProto with standard.site and Sequoia, plus the GitHub Actions wiring that republishes the records on every push without any manual steps.

1948 was an interesting time for computing. For decades, businesses had used punch card equipment that added and sorted electromechanically. Now these electromechanical relays and counting wheels were being used to build room-filling general-purpose computers such as Harvard Mark I (1944) and IBM's SSEC (1948). But slow electromechanical mechanisms were already becoming obsolete. World War II had fostered the development of electronics and vacuum tubes for radio, radar, and navigation. Electroni...